Northward Bound

School districts on the North Side have long been the region's largest and most highly rated. But districts mostly outside of Bexar County, like Comal and Boerne ISDs, are beginning to draw students at an even faster clip.

Every morning, kindergartner Coleby Keith eats his Fruit Loops at least an hour before the sun comes up. The moon still is high when he climbs the steps into the school bus that will ferry him along the winding, rural roads of southwestern Comal County, to his elementary school almost 11 miles away.

“I just saw a falling star!” he declared one chilly school day in October as he stared out the bus window into the early morning dark.

Coleby’s predawn, 45-minute bus ride isn’t surprising in Comal ISD, an enormous district encompassing 589 square miles, larger than the city of San Antonio. The district crosses into five counties, including Bexar, and also serves students living around Canyon Lake. Its headquarters, in New Braunfels, is 36 miles from Coleby’s home near Boerne.

Over the past 26 years, Comal ISD’s student population has jumped from 5,400 students to more than 21,000 this year — a 288 percent increase, the highest in the region.

Most of that growth is concentrated along the U.S. 281 and Interstate 35 corridors, following a housing boom in those areas. The district’s school buses travel, on average, a combined 17,000 miles a day.

But this population boom isn’t limited to Comal. Once rural school districts that are located partly, or entirely, outside Bexar County are starting to experience big enrollment spikes as these areas increasingly urbanize.

“All across America, rural areas near cities are starting to grow,” said Dale Adams, president of the Boerne ISD board. That school district has grown 201 percent since 1989, to a total enrollment of about 7,900 this school year. “The schools are one part of it. … Everybody hears about it, and then so they go, and then everybody else hears about it, and so they go.”

Many in Boerne ISD feel the area is growing too fast to keep its small-town feel. Traffic on Interstate 10 and the farm-to-market roads has grown congested even by big-city standards.

Adams and his wife chose Boerne while living in England, where she was stationed at an air base there. With a transfer planned to the San Antonio Military Medical Center, the couple wanted rigorous schools for their three children. Seeing Boerne’s statistics, including graduation rates and SAT scores, they thought, “This is perfect.”

Adams said he didn’t want schools to grow so large that the students most in need of individual attention — the gifted students and those lagging behind — start to fall through the cracks. The district’s enrollment is projected to grow by more than 4,000 students in the next decade. In response, voters in May approved a $175 million bond issue to fund two new elementary schools, a middle school and other improvements.

“We just see steady growth and we don’t see it slowing down anytime soon,” Adams said.

Growth’s new frontier

Northside and North East ISDs traditionally have experienced the most student population growth in the Bexar area, and they both remain the region’s most populous districts.

But that was part of the problem for parent Trini Fernandez when she was looking for schools five years ago for her two little daughters.

Fernandez and her husband, Luis Cisneros, were living in a small house near SeaWorld on the far West Side in Northside ISD. When the girls still were toddlers, Fernandez began to look into the area schools but didn’t like what she saw. Across the street, at the newly built Stevens High School, teenagers were fighting and spraying graffiti. Although they were in Northside ISD, based on state ratings “the schools over there were not as good as the ones over here in the north area of San Antonio,” Fernandez said.

So the family started looking for homes in the Stone Oak area in North East ISD. But Fernandez thought the closest elementary school was too big, at about 1,200 students at the time.

So the family members checked out a house in Lookout Canyon. They had no idea at first it was in Comal ISD.

“I thought when they said Comal that we were talking about New Braunfels,” Fernandez said, echoing a popular misconception.

The family fell in love with the neighborhood, the new house and Specht Elementary School, at the time less than half the size of the closest NEISD elementary campus. Fernandez also liked the neighborhood’s small-community feel, anchored by the school.

But unlike Comal, SCUC doesn’t have a strong commercial base: the vast majority of the growth happening within SCUC is residential. That means more students, but not the kinds of revenue increases new commercial development would yield.

The fastest-growing school districts in the area generally hold bond elections every three years, for tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to build new facilities.

Sometimes voters balk at the price tag: a $451 million bond was defeated three years ago in Comal ISD. The district successfully passed a much smaller bond last year that addressed the district’s immediate needs for two new middle schools.

It plans to return to voters in a few years to help fund construction of a new high school. By that time, both Canyon and Smithson Valley likely will be at 3,200 students each, well over their current capacities.

Boerne ISD is gaining a wealthier student body as the district grows. About 18 percent of students were economically disadvantaged last year — almost 3 percent fewer than in 2010 and a lower percentage than even Alamo Heights ISD in Bexar County.

The wealth has placed Boerne ISD on a list of property-rich districts that have to pay some money back to the state under the “Robin Hood” system. Last year, it paid 13 cents on the dollar, or $8 million compared to an operating budget of $63 million, which administrators call a big bite for a district scrambling to afford its own growth.

“That is our most difficult financial situation,” Boerne ISD Superintendent David Stelmazewski said. “We continue to struggle with the funding formula of the state of Texas and we just don’t think it’s sustainable.”

A legislative rewrite of the funding system that would have reduced the number of districts forced to send money back to the state died last year. Leaders of fast-growing property-wealthy districts were especially disappointed.

School districts both rich and poor have sued the state repeatedly over the past three decades, challenging the school finance system. A district court judge ruled two years ago that the system was unconstitutional. But the state appealed. On May 13, the Texas Supreme Court ruled the state’s system for funding public schools is constitutional.